VMware bungles cloud management portal upgrade, twice in two weeks

Promises to get it right this coming weekend

VMware has bungled a portal upgrade project that aims to give its customers a superior experience when managing their clouds.

In late August, the virtualization giant advised customers it would soon “transition” them from the existing VMware Cloud Services Portal to a new Cloud Services Console.

On September 13th, VMware advised the migration would take place between the 19th and 21st, and that the upgrade process would mean the existing VMware Cloud Services Portal became read-only.

On the last day of the planned migration VMware wrote to customers “to inform you that the anticipated transition of the VMware Cloud Services Portal to the new Cloud Services Console on Broadcom will not be going live on September 21 as originally communicated.”

The Broadcom business unit promised to try again the following weekend, but that attempt also failed.

Emails about that decision contain inconsistent information.

A message sent on September 26th states “our internal teams require additional time to ensure the transition to the new Cloud Services Console on Broadcom is as seamless as possible. As a result, our new go-live date will be this weekend between September 26–28.”

The Register logged on to VMware’s Cloud Services portal between those dates and saw notifications that the migration was in progress.

But an email sent on Monday the 29th states “Leading up to this past weekend’s planned go-live, our internal teams made the decision to change the date of the migration to the Cloud Services Console on Broadcom.”

The Broadcom business unit now intends to complete the migration between October 3rd and 6th.

The migration plan is consistent with Broadcom’s past decisions to replace VMware’s support sites with services that mirror the look and feel, and presumably backend, of the portals it operates for users of its other products.

That migration didn’t go brilliantly, with users initially reporting difficulty accessing licenses and still sometimes complaining of dead links to knowledge base articles. VMware has also struggled to adapt its new support portal to deliver security patches to holders of perpetual licenses.

VMware customers now have another problematic support migration experience to contemplate, even as Broadcom asks them to go all-in on its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite – a move many customers report comes with considerably increased costs when compared to previous VMware licenses.

In its defense, Broadcom can point to its on-time delivery of a maintenance release for VCF.

VMware’s William Lam blogged about the update, noting that it includes features that make it easier to create non-production VCF rigs for labs, or proofs of concept. The update also fixes plenty of bugs and includes many security patches.

Farewell, vSphere 7

This is a big week for some VMware users, because on Thursday October 2ndVMware the company will end support for vSphere and VSAN 7.x. The company planned to end support in April, but extended the products’ supported lifespan for unspecified reasons.

Many vendors think they can help users who are still using vSphere 7. Third-party support outfit Spinnaker last week promised “indefinite” support for the platform. Red Hat chose Monday to remind us all that its OpenShift Virtualization product makes creating virtual infrastructure easy, and therefore also eases migrations. And Nutanix last week expanded its support for external storage by allowing its platform to use Dell’s PowerStore boxes.

Those vendors, and others besides, continue to dangle fun new things in front of VMware users because some intend to lessen their reliance on Virtzilla, or ditch it entirely. Analyst firm Gartner believes so many users want out of the vStack that 35 percent of workloads currently hosted under VMware will run on other platforms by 2028. ®